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Nina Bouraoui

Biography

Nina Bouraoui was born Yasmina Bouraoui on 31 July 1967 in Rennes to an Algerian father and a French mother. She spent most of her childhood in Algeria, moving back to Brittany in 1980. Bouraoui later lived in Zurich and Abu Dhabi before returning to France to attend university in Paris, where she is now resident.

Bouraoui published her first text, La Voyeuse interdite, in 1991 and has since published eleven further texts with Gallimard, Fayard and Stock. Her texts are largely auto-fictional accounts written in the first-person, and follow an interminable rhythm of surges and leaps through short phrasing, repetition and anaphora, producing the effect of breathless urgency. The emphasis on the ‘je’ is ubiquitous in her writing, disclosing subjectivity to be key and, amongst Bouraoui’s principal concerns, is the mediation of the textual, sexual self.

Her first text, La Voyeuse interdite, presents challenging and often controversial images of the role of femininity in Algerian Islamic culture: a young girl, Fikria, narrates her experience of being stifled by the confining elements of her culture and seeks to transform her passive suffering and subjection to the male gaze into a reactive, performative, visionary pain, by appropriating and self-inflicting physical violence, as well as effecting a creative transformation of specular logic. The resulting acts of self-destruction that she and her sister endure (self-harm, anorexia) reveal Bouraoui’s fascination with the paradoxical presence of death and destruction in the formation and negotiation of subjectivity. Indeed, the texts that followed through the 1990s – Poing mort, Le Bal des murènes and L’Âge blessé – further develop the idea of the ghostliness of corporeal identity, in their different explorations of how melancholia, illness and death cloak embodied subjectivity.

Childhood is a recurrent theme in Bouraoui’s work and it is a space that is intimately connected to wildness and sensuality. As she has admitted in an interview, ‘J’ai toujours été fascinée par la jeunesse et sa sensualité. C’est un état sauvage où on a l’impression que la sexualité va définir notre personnalité’ (Lucie Geffroy: ‘Quand Nina Bouraoui parle des hommes’ [Magazine 360?, 11 June 2007]). Childhood is also closely associated with territory in these auto-fictional texts. ‘L’enfance est un pays aussi’ (‘Entretien’ [Delirium]), Bouraoui has claimed, and the focus of her next publication, Le Jour du séisme, is the childhood landscape of Algeria. The text starts and jolts with rhythmic uncertainty and territorial instability, as linguistic fragmentation and repetition link the fluctuations of subjectivity to the trembling of the earth ravaged by war and violence. Garçon manqué continues the theme of childhood, territorial violence and displacement, and their consequent embodiment in the subject. In this work, national identity and gendered identity are explicitly juxtaposed alongside one another as the narrator struggles to align herself to the binary cultural markers that seek to code her: French, Algerian, male, female.

From the turn of the millennium onwards, Bouraoui’s writing turned away from the abjection that characterised her earliest texts, and the emphasis on childhood and national identity of the middle years, and she became increasingly interested in articulations of desire and fluid sexualities. The 2002 La Vie heureuse marks the point at which she fully explores lesbian sexuality in her writing and expressions of lesbian desire are further developed in Poupée Bella’s diary-format. Mes Mauvaises Pensées is a confessional interior monologue that seeks to capture repressed and unconscious thoughts and desires, while Avant les hommes (2007) considers youth, identification and sexuality. With the recent Appelez-moi par mon prénom and Nos Baisers sont des adieux, Bouraoui offered further meditations on subjectivity and desire, writing and reality. Appelez-moi par mon prénom is explicitly inspired by Marguerite Duras, who, Bouraoui herself admits, exerts a strong influence across all of her work, along with Violette Leduc, Hervé Guibert and Annie Ernaux.

Bouraoui’s work has been met with critical acclaim from the beginning of her writing career, with La Voyeuse interdite being awarded the Prix du Livre Inter in 1991. More recently in 2005, Mes Mauvaises Pensées gained the prestigious Prix Renaudot. Bouraoui is perhaps best known as being at the forefront of contemporary francophone North African writing, as well as contemporary lesbian/queer writing in French. Her readership continues to develop across both popular and critical audiences, however, especially as her texts are becoming more widely translated.

Harrington, Katharine: ‘Writing Between Borders: Nomadism and its Implications for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies’ (Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 10.2, April 2006, pp. 117-125)

—: ‘Embodiment, Environment and the Reinvention of Self in Nina Bouraoui's Life-Writing’ in Women's Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature ed. by Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013, pp. 141-53)